Sweet Dreams - Olga Zilberbourg
Having reached the age of 55, my mother has decided to try out retirement. She won’t stop working—there are no opportunities for advancement in that—but she’s decided to branch out and sign up for an advanced English class after work. Her older sister is taking the same class, and my mother can’t let her sister surpass her at anything. This week, their teacher assigned them a few song lyrics to translate. My mother, determined to be an A-student, messages me for help.
“Is there anybody out there?” It’s Pink Floyd, I tell her, from “The Wall.” Pink is watching “Gunsmoke” on TV, the wall inside his head is almost finished, and he can’t help wondering whether there’s anyone who can help him break it down from the outside. “Is there anybody out there?” is his distress call. “Wow,” my mother says. “I’d better send you the entire exercise. I’m getting it all wrong.” Fine, I tell her, but I already know English. “Don’t be so American.” My mom types quickly, I’m barely able to catch up. “‘Love changes everything,’ what does this mean?” There’s an eleven-hour time difference between St. Petersburg and San Francisco. What’s 9 pm her time is 10 am for me, and I’ve just had my morning coffee and opened my inbox. I need to get some work done. But then there’s never a good time to talk; when it’s evening my time, she’s at work herself, and she never has time to talk to me when she’s working.
“Love changes everything,” I don’t see two ways to interpret this—what does she think it means? “That you must love every change that happens to you,” she explains. She fails to see that “love” in this sentence is used as a noun, and “changes” is the verb. In her version, love becomes a command, an order: “Love the changes!” Obviously, she needs help. I’ve been encouraging her to learn English for years now—once in a while, she talks about making her retirement final and coming to live with me in the U.S.—knowing English would really help then. “What’s the subject of this sentence?” I ask, and she immediately writes back: “This sentence has no subject. It’s a subjectless sentence.” I remind her that this is unlikely, that in English, every proper declarative sentence must have a subject, and when she considers this proposition, she finally gets it. “Love changes everything! Wow—this is so backwards,” she writes.
I wonder how my aunt is doing with this exercise, and if she’s got my cousin helping her from Sweden. The two sisters could be helping each other, practicing their conversation skills when they get together for dinner or meet at the country house to prune apple trees or to pick strawberries, but no. “I know English so much better than she does, and why should I help her?” my mother scoffs at the suggestion. “Let her fend for herself. She would do the same to me.” It’s easy for me, from across the ocean, to fantasize about the communal life back at home, but conversations like this quickly remind me how things really are. Everything between the two sisters is a competition. Even when they pick strawberries together, they carefully weigh each other’s crops to see who scored better. Both my aunt and my mother have managed to jettison their children to the other side, where the grass is greener, and now all they have is each other. My mother has no time to revel in her success, she’s anxious to move on. “Everybody’s looking for something,”—what does this mean? “That’s Eurythmics, ‘Sweet Dreams.’ What does it mean to you?” “I think, it means that everyone’s spying on everyone else,” she offers. This is not translation as much as a diagnosis; clearly, there’s nothing I can really do to help her.
I’m almost ready to sign off, when I get a message from my cousin. “Everybody’s looking for something? Translate, please.” “You should know this,” I write back. “This is English 101.” “I’m in the middle of a meeting, no time to chat,” he responds. This is the most I’ve heard from my cousin in over a month, and despite the curtness of his message, I sit back in my chair and giggle at the computer screen. It’s 11 am already, and my morning is shot, but I don’t mind it anymore. What if our mothers did, indeed, learn English this way and moved to be closer to us? I’d have to learn to be a lot more flexible with my schedule then, to love the changes.
Originally published by Mad Hatters’ Review: Back from the USSR 2010
Olga Zilberbourg is the author of LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES (WTAW Press) and four Russian-language story collections. She has published fiction and essays in Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Narrative, Alaska Quarterly Review, Confrontation, Scoundrel Time, and elsewhere. She co-edits Punctured Lines, a feminist blog on post-Soviet and diaspora literatures, and co-hosts the San Francisco Writers Workshop.
